God Is Dead, Friedrich Nietzsche
December 1882, Sils-Maria SWITZERLAND
[Nietzsche enters stage right, walks to the center of the stage and stops. He pulls out his glasses]
To find everything deep is an inconvenient quality: it makes us more constantly strain our eyes, [puts on his glasses] and in the end we always find more than we wish.
[light laughter in the crowd N. now, gravely, then quizzically:]
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning light, ran to the marketplace and shouted incessantly, ‘I seek God!’, ‘I seek God!’? As there were many people there who did not believe in God, he caused much amusement. ‘Is he lost?’, asked one. ‘Did he wander off like a child?’, asked another. ‘Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us?, asked another. Has he gone to sea? Has he emigrated?’ \And so they carried on, shouting and laughing_.\
Then the madman leaped into their midst and looking at them with piercing eyes cried, ‘Where did God go? I will tell you! We have killed Him - you and I! We are all His murderers!’ [N. Pauses]
But how did we do this? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it heading? Where are we heading? \Without God \ are we not constantly falling in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Are we not straying through an infinite nothingness? Do we hear nothing yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing yet of the divine Putrefaction? [Another small pause. N. collects himself]
God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed Him! How shall we ever console ourselves? With what water might we be purified? [changes his tone to one of potential optimism and hope]
Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? [with growing strength of voice] Must not we become gods ourselves, if only to appear worthy of it?
[He is silent for a few seconds. He paces while scanning the crowd] \So said the madman.
After Buddha died, people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave - a monstrous and unearthly shadow. God is Dead; but given human nature, perhaps for millennia to come there will be caves in which His Shadow will be shown.
Let us beware of \His Shadows! Let us beware of believing that the universe is a machine; it is certainly not constructed for any one purpose. The overall character of the world is chaos; not in the sense of a lack of necessity, but rather in the sense of a lack of order, structure, form, beauty, or wisdom. [quick pause]
Let us beware of imputing to the universe heartlessness and irrationality, or their opposites; it is neither perfect, nor beautiful, nor noble, nor wished to become any of these things; it by no means strives to emulate us! It knows no law. We must beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities. There is no one who commands or obeys or transgresses. \I don’t wish to dwell too long on these\ shadows of God \but to ask how we are to overcome them. When will they no longer darken our understanding? When may we begin to “naturalize” ourselves by means of the pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?
\This, the greatest event of recent times - the fact that ‘God is dead’, that the belief in the Christian God has become untenable - has already begun to cast its shadows over \the world. For the few \sensitive\ and strong enough for this drama, some sun seems to have set. To these eyes our old world must seem to be becoming more strange and old with every passing day. \But for most people\ the event is much too great, too remote, too far beyond their capacity to understand. \Few realize\ what things would have to collapse now that the belief has been undermined, because they were built upon it, leaned against it and had become intertwined with it. For example our entire…morality.
So how do we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ experience the news that the ‘old God is dead’? We are by no means sad and gloomy, but rather as if illuminated by a new dawn. At last the horizon seems free again, ready to face every danger; every venture of the knowledge-seeker is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again before us; perhaps there has never been such an ‘open sea’. [Another couple seconds pause]
(3.124) We have left dry land and put out to sea! True, \this sea\ does not always roar…but there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more terrible than infinity.
(2.107) \And yet, \ as an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us. Through art, we are given the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make ourselves such phenomena. We have lent new colors to things. We are constantly painting them anew…
\And yet\ we must occasionally take a rest from ourselves by artistically distancing ourselves from ourselves…we must now and then rejoice in our folly, that we may continue to rejoice in our wisdom! And precisely because we are, in the final analysis, such weighty and serious men [speaking now as an aside] more weights than men [the crowd gives a muffled nervous laughter] nothing does us so much good as the “fools cap and bells”: we especially need them when we are alone with ourselves – we need every kind of exuberant, soaring, dancing, mocking, childish and blessed art lest we lose our freedom, our ability to stand above things. We should…be able to stand above morality…not…with the anxious rigidity \fearing\ that at any moment \we\ may slip and fall, but to soar and play above it as well! And to that end how could we do without art, \and\ without the fool?
Let us remain faithful to ourselves in that which is the true and original in us…our lives should also be justified in our own eyes! …These words ring in my ears: That passion is better than Stoicism and hypocrisy; that to be honest even in evil is better than to lose oneself in traditional morality…that the unfree man is an affront to nature. \And as free men, we knowledge seekers,\ the seal of our liberation is to no longer be ashamed of [ourselves]. [Pause]
/—-— Here he switches subjects, talking about the old morality and problems he has with it —-/
(1.21)
\Traditional morality, and its praise of virtue, must be unmasked so we can see it for what it truly is.
The praise of virtue is the praise of some private harm – it is praise of impulses which deprive a man of his noblest selfishness, and the strength to take the greatest care of himself.
The praise of the unselfish, self-sacrificing, virtuous person – who therefore does not expend his whole energy and reason for his own preservation, development, ennoblement, advancement and extension of power, but who leads a humble and thoughtless life, perhaps even an indifferent or ironical one – in any case, this praise is not born of the spirit of unselfishness! The ’neighbor’ praises unselfishness because it redounds to his own advantage! Were the neighbor’s own intentions ‘unselfish’, he would reject this impairment of strength, this injury to others on his behalf, he would counteract such tendencies as they emerge, and above all he would show his unselfishness by the very fact of not calling them good!
(3.118) Is it virtuous when a cell transforms itself into a function of a stronger cell? It must. And is it evil when the stronger assimilates the weaker? It also must: it is necessary, for it has to have ample replenishment and wishes to regenerate itself.
(3.116) Wherever we find a morality we find a value judgment and a hierarchy of human impulses and activities. These value judgments and hierarchies are always the expression of the needs of a community or herd; that which is to its greatest advantage…Morality teaches the individual to become a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function.
(1.4) In truth, the evil impulses are every bit as expedient, indispensable and conducive to the preservation of \humanity\ as the good – they just have a different function. The strongest and most evil minds have thus far advanced mankind the most: they ever rekindled slumbering passions – all orderly society lulls the passions to sleep – they ever reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in … innovation and adventure, compelling people to set opinion against opinion, epitome against epitome. …The good people of every age are farmers of the mind who dig deep into the soil of the old thoughts and get it to bear fruit. But in the end, every soil becomes exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must come, again and again.
(1.19) \If this sounds wrong\ examine the lives of the best and most fruitful men and peoples, and ask yourself: can a tree grow proud and tall without storms and inclemency? Disregard and opposition, all sorts of obstinacy, cruelty, greed, distrust, jealousy, hatred and violence – are these not among the favorable circumstances without which great growth, even in virtue, is scarcely possible? The poison by which the weaker natures perish strengthens the strong – and they do not call it poison.
(3.267) \I believe\ in this: that the weights of all things must be determined anew. A new justice is needed! And new philosophers! And when we have such an aim, we are superior not only to our deeds and judges, but to justice itself.
To expiate ourselves of the death of God, to redeem ourselves to our newly discovered nature, we must become the poets of our lives.
The secret to harvesting the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from existence is to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas. Live in war with your equals and with yourselves.
To overcome; to face at the same time our greatest suffering and our greatest hope – that is what makes us heroic.
[pause, changing his tone to less exuberant] \Yet, for the time being, things are quite different; …the comedy of life has not yet ‘become conscious’ of itself. For the time being, it is still the age of tragedy, the age of moralities and religions.
\In closing, let me tell you what happened with the madman. When the madman fell silent and looked at his listeners, they stood silent and baffled. He threw down his lantern on the ground so it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I have come too early…this is not yet the right time. This tremendous event is still on its way…This deed is further away from them than the farthest star–and yet they have done it themselves!’.
(Jumping back to 1.125) [Now addressing the crowd directly] God is Dead! God remains dead! And we have killed Him! How shall we, the most murderous of all murderers, ever console ourselves? (1.153) Where are we to find a tragic resolution? [Pause] Should we begin to consider a comic solution?
(Poem #63)
\Let me leave you with this poem. It’s called “Star Morality”:
Foredoomed to spaces vast and far,
What matters darkness to the star?
Roll calmly on, let time go by,
Let sorrows pass thee—nations die!
Compassion would but dim the light
That distant worlds will gladly sight.
To thee one law—be pure and bright!
Thank you. [applause]